


a voice silent cries

by mickleborger



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Gen, POV Third Person, terrible haunted places are people too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 16:23:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15844974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: rey + 11. “In autumn you can smell the fields, burning far away.”





	a voice silent cries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meritmut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/gifts).



> (The Flower Kings, "A Vampire's View")

i.

At the top of the island there is a tree, and Rey who knows actually very little about trees knows that this one should have died long ago.  It is a blackened and spindly thing that sprawls into the sky, into the earth; a big splotch of nothing against shades of blue she has no words for.  It should not be here.  It is taking up space that could be suited for flowers.

(She has no words for these flowers, either, soft fragile dots of color that grow where they please, so easy to tear off but so quick to come back, clambering over themselves with no thought for order.)

The big somber tree sits on top of the hill and eats into the sky and grips the island in roots like the fingers of a man fallen into the desert and there turned to stone.  Rey does not think about that so much, thinking as she is of the things on the shore and under it.  A great sad husk of a thing sits on the island and faces the sea without seeing it.

ii.

She never touched the sand on Jakku if she could help it, not that slippery hot thing that made it hard to tell where girl ended and dune began, not that whispering mire that lives behind her eyes still.  There is sand on Ahch-to but it is not _that_ sand, no; it does not slither, does not creep.  The sand on Ahch-to is silent, even when she scratches it into spiraling piles, even when her hand sinks as far as it can go into it.  She is looking for a fight with this sand but it's not the sand on this planet that gets into fights.

Behind her on the hill is the dark-on-dark silhouette of the tree that is not dead and she realizes, sand wedged under her fingernails and hair stuck to her face, that she is missing from something.

iii.

In the desert, in the corpse she used to live in, is a wall all scratched over with days she had nothing else to do but to count.  The walls here are scorched with days counted ahead of time, and she does not think she should touch them.  She thinks maybe her fingertips would blister, and that the walls, besides, do not want to be touched.  They are waiting for something and she is not that thing.  They are waiting for something and they are tired of waiting.

The thing below the island is beyond the reach of those terrible half-dead roots and it has only ever waited, but Ray cannot be sure what for.  There is only her in that place which she knows was there before her, and will remain after, and she cannot see past herself to the thing that waits.

She is not the one laughing in this place far below the ruined tree.  Perhaps this is not laughter she hears at all.

iv.

There is someone lingering outside the doorway, as if though he cannot see her surroundings he has a sense of what they are, of not belonging there.  The sunlight hits the windows the wrong way and throws them into shadow and he watches, ghost-pale at the threshold; and she wanders, ghost-white against the rock.

Then he is gone again, and the sense of not belonging lingers.

v.

It is only a tree, she says to herself, and I know nothing about trees.  If there ever were any in the sands that spat her out they were gone long before her, shriveled and swallowed by the desert like the little clouds of something she sees in the water, too quick to vanish.  Were they wild and rolling trees, like on Takodana, thick and shady, barely understanding where the boundaries between forest and stone are drawn?  She thinks of the green things creeping in through Maz Kanata's window.  She thinks of the big grey wraith up on the hill, clinging.  She thinks maybe it is lonely.

vi.

She is on the ship and she smells smoke but it is not the smoke of the ship, not a smoke she recognizes, not a smoke of sand and metal.  If she could ask Ben he would tell her exactly what rotted wood smells like when it burns, but Ben is answering no one's questions now, not even his own.

But under the smell of blood and charred flesh and fuel there is that strange smokiness, faint and fake as a memory almost forgotten; and under it Rey almost hears a sobbing, or a laughing.  Or both.


End file.
